Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas3 Touko 2021

145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected world. Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book from a couple of years ago, The Square and the Tower, that considered how an interplay between networks and hierarchies has shaped the history of the world. This analysis is directly relevant to how we deal with large-scale catastrophes, which is the subject of his new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. We talk about global culture as a complex system, and what it means for our ability to respond to crisis.

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Niall Ferguson received his D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford. He is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of numerous book, several of which have been adapted into television documentaries, and has helped found several different companies. He won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money, and has previously been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

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Holiday Message | Hits and Misses

It's the end of the year, and time for our annual holiday break here at Mindscape. But as usual, we wrap up with a Holiday Message. This year, inspired by Joni Mitchell's "Hits" and "Misses" albums, I...

23 Joulu 20242h 1min

299 | Michael Wong on Information, Function, and the Origin of Life

Living organisms seem exquisitely organized and complex, with features clearly adapted to serving certain functions needed to survive and procreate. Natural selection provides a compelling explanation...

16 Joulu 20241h 13min

298 | Jeff Lichtman on the Wiring Diagram of the Brain

The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly con...

9 Joulu 20241h 9min

AMA | December 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Joulu 20243h 55min

297 | Emily Wilson on Homer, Poetry, and Translation

Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation of Homer's epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche will headline a film based on The Odyssey. Give...

25 Marras 20241h 15min

296 | Brandon Ogbunu on Fitness Seascapes and the Course of Evolution

Biological evolution via natural selection is a simple idea that becomes enormously complicated in its realization. Populations of organisms are driven toward increased "fitness," a measure of how suc...

18 Marras 20241h 15min

295 | Solo: Emergence and Layers of Reality

Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the world intelligible to us -- we can sensibly understand ...

11 Marras 20241h 35min

AMA | November 2024

Welcome to the November 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

4 Marras 20243h 50min